Foreskins and face creams, my bitches!

Sullivan gives us this drive-by post which eventually leads us to this post at The Stir on medical uses of baby foreskins.

These include the frivolous (collagen for wrinkle creams), the lifesaving (skin grafts for burn victims) and the weird (cosmetic testing).

One question for these endeavors might be: what about adult foreskins? Wouldn’t they be able to do the same things with a foreskin taken from an 18-year-old who asked to be circumcised, as from a newborn whose parents made his decision for him? Christie Haskell apparently answers that much here:

Like embryonic stem cells, not all cells are fully “dedicated” or haven’t fully developed their identifying proteins, meaning they haven’t quite decided for good what they want to be when they grow up and therefore are much more versatile. This means that they can be used to help cultivate skin and skin byproducts (like collagen) with very little chance of rejection.

Well, that sounds a lot more applicable to a newborn’s foreskin than that of a grown man.

Another question I have, however, about the use of foreskin fibroblasts in high-end face creams is: do they actually accomplish anything? Pretty much every time someone actually investigates the super-duper hopped-up skin care products, they find its benefits are very limited. It moisturizes. It may provide some benefit based on the act of rubbing it in. That’s pretty much it. I’m sure the cosmetic companies spend many thousands of dollars growing fibroblasts on foreskins and mixing them into face creams, but do the fibroblasts really make a difference when they go on your face? Until I see studies funded by someone not in the cosmetics industry, I will assume they are no better than what I can mix up in my kitchen for under $3.

This is where it gets weird:

A third use is cosmetic testing — rather than using animals, a lot of companies pay thousands of dollars for one foreskin to begin replicating to perform their cosmetic tests on. Not only does this give much more accurate results since it’s human skin, but it saves the lives of normally tortured animals.

So, instead of abusing animals, now we can perform medically unnecessary genital alterations on newborn boys.

There is more logic to that change than I make it sound; testing on animals means using live, whole, conscious animals who can feel what’s being done to them, every time. Once a foreskin is removed from a baby, they can mess with the foreskin once, or a thousand times, without causing the baby further injury or suffering.

Meanwhile, the use of foreskin collagen in skin grafts for burns and ulcers is medically powerful enough to put an additional layer of emotion on the debate over circumcision. With that in mind, Haskell closes with this:

But with all the amazing technology and lives saved and bodies healed from the unique cells a single foreskin can create, there’s got to be a good common ground somewhere.

Manipulative, much?

A similar case could be made just as easily for conscripting adults for blood donation. There’s no denying the number of lives saved by blood transfusions, and how many more people would be saved from premature death if only we could get more people to donate on a regular basis. Should we bring about mandatory blood donation, then? An adult body can regenerate a pint of blood in a matter of days. The foreskin never grows back.

Another question I have for these uses, on a biological rather than ethical level, is: what about adult stem cells? It sounds very much like the useful cells in foreskins work a lot like embryonic stem cells. Since scientists have recently found that menstrual blood contains stem cells which are less flexible than embryonic but more viable than adult, might it be possible to derive collagen and fibroblasts from menstrual blood? Would that be any more icky than making face creams (used overwhelmingly by women past a certain age) with products grown on pieces cut from baby boys’ penises?

Whether the companies making use of neonatal foreskin will explore more ethically uncomplicated (i.e. not taken from helpless babies) alternatives depends on how money talks. Since a company will pay thousands of dollars to purchase one foreskin, hospitals have a major financial incentive to encourage parents to have their sons circumcised, or maybe even go ahead and circumcise the babies without the parents’ consent. There’s that additional degree of separation between the baby getting circumcised and the people who are going to use his foreskin. There’s that additional incentive for medical personnel to play up the benefits of male circumcision (even those that apply mainly to grown men) and downplay the risks to babies. They have the history of widespread use of newborn circumcision in the U.S. on their side in persuading parents to have their sons cut. Besides, now that they know what they can do with baby penis parts, why bother experimenting with bio-products taken from adults? Why not just keep doing something they know is effective?

After all, lives are being saved. Think of the burn victims and ulcer patients. Think of the animals that will never again be tortured in the name of beauty!

I suspect most of the money, however, is in the skin creams. The amount of money to be made from the feminine insecurity is one of the top wonders of the modern world.